“How do we get them?”
“That guy I called from St. Paul—Bobby, the one I didn’t want you to know about—could get them in two minutes,” I said.
“So let’s get them,” she said.
“I have to go out to a pay phone,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to call that number from here.”
“And if we go out to a pay phone, then I won’t know it,” she said. “It won’t be on my long-distance bill.”
“That, too,” I said.
We went out to a mall and I hooked up my own laptop at a pay phone using a pair of old-fashioned acoustic-adapter earmuffs. After going through the security rigamarole, I got Bobby online and asked him to get me the numbers dialed from all phones at Jack’s house on Sunday night, and then on Friday night, when he was killed. He said it would take a few minutes, but he should have them by the time we got back to the house. I said fine, and then added that I needed a mailing address to send him a package.
WHAT?
4 2-GIG JAZ DISKS . NEED MORE EYES LOOKING AT THEM . COME FROM STANFORD .
SEND TO JOHN. HE WILL BRING TO ME.
Lane was looking over my shoulder and said, “So he doesn’t mind calling in, as long as we don’t call out.”
“If you managed to trace the incoming call, it’d probably go back to the local bagel bakery, or Pontiac dealer, or something. He’s weird about telephones,” I said.
“What does this guy do for a living? Bobby?”
“Databases. Thousands of them. He still does some phone work, but mostly to cover up his database entries. About the only things he can’t get into are the ones without an outside connection, and that’s damn few of them, anymore. Maybe some military or national security computers; stuff at that level would be pretty tough, though I know he’s in some of them. He’s been there forever. He’s like an unknown, unofficial systems administrator.”
The phone was ringing when we got back to the house. Not Bobby—it was an air freight place: Jack’s body would arrive the following day, and would be taken to a local funeral home. Lane put the phone down to say something, but it rang again almost instantly. Again, not Bobby.
“Yes, this is Lane . . . yes? What! What do you mean? Burned down? Well, how much is left? Did it get all of his personal stuff? Well, how bad? Aw, jeez. I told you guys—I hold you guys responsible, I’m gonna talk to an attorney, you never let me in there and then I told you somebody killed my brother, and now they burned his house, and you guys didn’t even have time to look into it . . . Bullshit. BULLSHIT! I’m gonna come there, I’m gonna come there as soon as the funeral is over, and I’m going to want to talk to whoever is in charge . . .”
“Was I good?” she asked when she hung up.
“You were very good,” I said.
Bobby called ten minutes later. We got the tone, I hastily slapped the muffs on, and two columns of numbers popped up. Between six and midnight Sunday, Jack made three phone calls. On Friday, he made a long-distance call to California at seven o’clock, that lasted twenty minutes: “That’s our ISP, I have the same one,” Lane said. He made another call at nine forty-five, and nothing later.
“So the nine forty-five call must be the one to the security computers,” I said. “We can check that.”
“But he didn’t call that number on Sunday night,” Lane said.
“Which means he didn’t turn off the camera on Sunday night,” I said.
“Which means that maybe he hadn’t found the security system. I wonder if the camera’s out in the open?”
I scratched my head and thought about it for a couple of minutes, and finally said, “You know, I think maybe they killed him.”
“I’ve been telling you that.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t believe you,” I said. “There was too much weight on the other side. But if Jack knew about the security system on Sunday, he would have turned it off before he went in. If he found out about the system between Sunday night and Friday night, he’d have known he was in trouble—that the camera would have picked him up. If he knew all that, then why didn’t he add anything to the letter he sent me? If they scared him, and he knew he was in trouble . . .”
“I just thought of something else,” Lane said. “They say he broke into the secure area on Friday night. Well, if he went in there on Sunday night . . . why didn’t he have to break in that time? Why was the first break-in on Friday, when we know he was there on Sunday?”
“One of the first things we do is try to figure out how to get into a place without anybody knowing,” I said. “LuEllen and I talked to Jack about that, a little, about not leaving a mark . . . that’s why I looked for the house key at Jack’s place. Better to ease your way in, than to break something, and he knew that.” I took a turn around the kitchen, working it through, finally shook my head. “I can see how they could have set it up. It’d take two guys, but they’d have to be brutal assholes to shoot that old man, the guard.”
“Two guys came to burn down the house,” she said. She said it quietly, like a scholar making the killing point.
“Goddamnit,” I said after a while. “I think they killed him.”
7
We sent the second copies of the Jaz disks off to Bobby’s friend John Smith—also a friend of mine, and an artist himself—and I spent the next two days trying to find something that made sense on the Jaz disks, and working along the edges of the bay, with watercolor. Salty water has a different quality from fresh water, a heavier, more viscous feel. The heaviness was compounded by the light, which was very green and hard. I never got it quite right.
Lane stayed at the house, getting ready for the funeral, doing a little telecommuting and some restless reading. She also spent some time poking through the Jaz disks, but neither of us found much.
Three days after the fire, the blisters on her arms were drying to unsightly splotches of itchy dead skin, while the redness under her neck had begun to fade to brown. I brought in meals during the day, and in the cool evenings we walked out to dinner at a dimly lit Italian place, where the burns wouldn’t be visible.
The funeral took place on a beautiful California morning, fifty people gathered in an old-fashioned Spanish-style stucco chapel, where an Episcopalian priest said all the right words with the right dignity. The women cried, the men shook hands and Harry Connick Jr.’s “Sunny Side of the Street” played through the sound system as Jack’s childhood friends carried his casket out the side door.
LuEllen walked in the door a few seconds after the service started. I almost didn’t recognize her in the New York black dress, hat, and wraparound sunglasses. She lifted a hand to me and slipped into a pew across the way. Lane didn’t notice—she was out of it, struggling through the worst week of her life, struggling to get her older brother into the ground.
At the end of the service, Lane went to the front door to shake hands. LuEllen drifted over to me and said, “Bummer.”
I said, “Yeah,” and then, “You’re looking nice. The black dress.”
“I was working in New York,” she said. LuEllen was something of a chameleon. In black, without lipstick, with her close-cropped frosted-blond hair, she could have been a London model, except that she was too short, and her shoulders a tad too wide. When she put on Western shirts, the kind with the arrows at the corners, and cowboy boots, you’d swear she’d come straight back from hauling hay out to a horse barn in Wyoming, a rosy-cheeked good-time country girl. In Miami, she could have been a drug dealer’s bimbo; in San Diego, a slightly used Navy wife on the lookout for a Coronado Island admiral . . .
But she was a lot more than all of that.
“Anything good?” I asked.
“Coin dealer. Let it go. Way too much protection.” She looked around with the kind of eye-drooping, stand-back attitude she tended to develop after a couple of weeks of pushing her way around Manhattan.
“Not like you need the money,” I said.
“Not yet, anyway,” she said. She nodded at Lane. “Who
’s the chick? Jack wasn’t married, was he?”
“His sister. Lane Ward.”
“Oh, yeah; when you look at her close, you can see it.” She looked at Lane and then back up at me: “Too much makeup for my style,” she said.
“There’s a story behind it.” I told her about the house and the fire. “So she’s flash-burned on her neck and arms and the cops want to talk to her. We’re trying to bullshit our way through the funeral, then get her out of sight until she’s healed.”
“Gotta hurt,” she said. LuEllen was unimpressed by pain; her own or anybody else’s.
“It does. The doc said it’d take eight or ten days to heal, so we’ve got a while to go.”
“Can we talk with her around?”
“I think so; but I haven’t given her anything on you at all, except your first name, and I’ll keep it that way.”
“All right,” she said. Then: “You getting laid?”
“Not by Lane, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“By who?”
“Software lady back in the Cities. We’re building a computer together.” I couldn’t see her eyes, but I could tell they were rolling.
“Nerd love,” she said.
“Nerd love,” I agreed. “How about you?”
“Nothing right now. I’ve been working pretty hard. I did a hundred and seventy thousand in Miami a couple of months ago, scared myself brainless.”
“Come close?”
“Not to getting caught, but the people . . . bunch of peckerwood meth manufacturers. If they’d figured me out, they would’ve cut me up with a chainsaw, and I shit you not.”
Sometimes LuEllen and I were in bed, sometimes not. She had a taste for slender, dark-haired Latin men with big white teeth. I’m not any of that. We hadn’t been in the sack for a while, but I expected that she’d be back. Or I would, or something. We’d probably be buried next to each other, sooner or later: funeral thoughts.
On the way out of the church, I introduced her to Lane, who smiled and nodded, and we went outside. I’d driven Lane to the church in her car, but she’d ride to the cemetery with friends. I decided to go with LuEllen, and pick up Lane’s car on the way back.
“You know what wouldn’t be a bad way to go?” LuEllen asked, on the way out to the cemetery. “You know your time has come, it’s all over. Go up in the North Woods in the wintertime, where there are wolves around. You sit down, take your coat off, and chill out. Wouldn’t hurt. You’d just go to sleep, and instead of rotting, you’d be a dinner for the wolves. Something useful—and you’d wind up as a wolf yourself, sort of.”
“Wouldn’t hurt as long as the wolves didn’t get there early,” I said.
“That’s really romantic,” she said.
“Or you’d probably wind up getting eaten by field mice. Voles.”
“Shut up, Kidd.”
Half the people at the church followed to the cemetery. Jack was buried in a smoothly curving piece of the earth framed by a dozen small redwoods; nice spot. The funeral was one of those where, after the coffin is let down into the ground, the bystanders walk by and toss a handful of dirt into the grave. We filed past, LuEllen a step ahead of me, and when I turned past the top of the grave, saw a thick-necked man in a suit and sunglasses standing a hundred yards away, half concealed behind a granite gravestone.
I’d seen him once before, I thought: outside the house in Dallas, his face silhouetted by a streetlight.
“Got a problem,” I muttered to LuEllen. “You got your cameras?”
“In the car,” she said. She looked right at me, too smart to look for trouble.
“I’m gonna turn, and if you look past my shoulder, you’ll see a guy in a gray suit and black sunglasses, about a hundred yards off. What are the chances of getting a shot?”
I turned and she turned with me, smiling, saying, “Yadda yadda yadda,” and then, “All right, I got him. He’s not a cop, unless he’s some kind of federal spook that I don’t want to know about.”
“He’s not a cop,” I said. “He could be private security. He could be a major asshole.”
The people at the funeral were starting to look around, ready to start moving as soon as the last handful of dirt was dropped in the grave. LuEllen said, “Let me give you a peck, say good-bye,” and I leaned over and she gave me a peck on the cheek and started for her car, lifting a hand to wave good-bye as she went.
She was the first to go; her car was only fifty feet down the cemetery lane. She popped the trunk with a remote key, pulled out a shoulder bag, tossed it across the front seat, started the car and drove away. I turned, casually, saw the man in the gray suit still standing there, but faced in a different direction, looking ninety degrees away from us. The last handful of dirt went in the grave, and Lane shook hands with a couple of people, and took the arm of a guy who, with his wife, had driven her to the cemetery: their oldest friends, Jack’s and Lane’s, and from what I’d seen, nice people.
As Lane started moving toward the car, the man in gray started to move, down away from the stone where he was standing. I couldn’t see a car—it was apparently behind an evergreen-covered knoll, out of sight. LuEllen had only had a couple of minutes to set up, and I wasn’t sure if she was ready yet. Nothing to do about it, and since I’d come with her, I had nothing to do but wait. The man in the gray suit came to watch? Couldn’t be that simple.
Everybody was moving now, but Lane, about to get in the backseat of her friends’ car, saw me standing, watching, and called, “Kidd? Where’s your friend?”
I strolled over and said, “Give me a hug?”
With a question on her face, she stepped over to give me a hug and I said, quietly as I could, “One of the people who burned Jack’s house is here.”
“Oh, no.” She took my arm and led me a few steps away from the car, looking up at me earnestly, as if giving comfort. What she said was, “What’s he doing? Do you see him?”
“He left as soon as you started to. I gotta get back to your house. I’m afraid he might have been here to keep an eye on you while the other guy broke in. Are Jack’s disks . . .”
“On my desk. Both copies.”
“Shit.”
“But we sent a set to Bobby . . .”
“Yeah, but if they get the others, they’ll know that we’ve at least looked at them,” I said. “Or that you have, anyway.”
“But we don’t know anything. Not really,” she said.
“They don’t know that.”
LuEllen’s rental car whipped around the knoll, moving too fast on the narrow black-topped cemetery lane. She pulled up, popped the door and said, “Got him, and got his plate.”
“Good. We’ve gotta get back to Lane’s place. Like now.”
“Call the police,” Lane said. LuEllen and I glanced at each other. She caught it and said, “Okay. I’ll call the police. We’ll find a pay phone on the way out. The guy who was here knows we can’t get back there for half an hour. If there is another guy, maybe the police could still catch him.”
“Worth a try,” I said.
“Wait for me.”
She went back to her friends’ car, leaned in the back, said something, got her purse, and hurried back to us. “I’m riding with you,” she said.
We drove out to a gas station, spotted a drive-up coin phone. LuEllen dialed 911 and passed the phone to Lane, who said, “Look, I don’t want to get involved in this, but I think I saw a man breaking into a house. No, I don’t want to get involved . . .” She gave the address, hung up, and we were gone.
LuEllen would not have anything more to do with any cops: “I’ll drop you at the church so you can get Lane’s car, and I’ll call you from a motel.”
“Sure.”
LuEllen looked at Lane: “If the cops are there when you get there . . .”
“I’ll be surprised.”
“Tell them that you were at your brother’s funeral. Right up front. First thing.”
“Why?”
“That’ll fit you into a slot, for the cops. Dopers hit houses during funerals. The neighbors have gotten used to people coming and going, and during the funeral itself, the house is usually empty, so it’s a good time to go in. It’s like a thing.”
“Like an MO,” Lane said.
“Right, exactly,” LuEllen said. “Like television.”
The cops were there, two squads, four officers. We pulled up and one of them came trotting over. Lane got out and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Do you live here, ma’am?”
“Yes, it’s my house.”
“We think it may have been broken into. We got an anonymous nine-one-one call and when we checked, we found the front door had been forced.”
Lane’s hand went to her throat and she said, “Is the man . . .”
“We don’t think he’s inside. We talked to one of the neighbors and he said he saw a man exit the back door, and walk away down the street—that was just about the time we got the nine-one-one call. He had a fifteen-minute start on us by the time we talked to the neighbor, so he’s miles away. His car was probably right around the corner.”
“Oh, my god,” Lane said, and she started walking toward the house. I said to the cop, “We were just at her brother’s funeral.”
“You’re not her husband?” One of the cops asked, as the others started after Lane.
“No, I’m just a friend of her brother’s; I drove her car to the church.”
“We better check the house, just in case,” he said.
Inside, as the cops moved from one room to the next, Lane looked at me and shook her head, silently mouthed, “They’re gone.” Also gone: her laptop, a jewelry box with a few hundred dollars’ worth of jewelry—and a lot of memories, Lane said—a Minolta 35mm camera and three lenses, a checkbook, a couple of hundred English pounds that she kept in a bureau drawer, and a broken Rolex watch given her by her ex-husband.
“Making it look like they were here for the high-value stuff . . . laptops, cameras. Making it look like junkies,” I muttered.
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 52